At least 18 people were killed and more than 150 injured after an Air India Express Boeing 737 aircraft on a coronavirus evacuation flight plunged down a slope in heavy rain in the southern city of Kozhikode, in India.
Hardeep Singh Puri, the country's civil aviation minister, confirmed that among the fatalities of the accident There are the two pilots of the aircraft, which succumbed on Friday when it slid down a landing strip at the top of a hill.
Captain Deepak Sathe, the pilot in command, and his co-pilot Akhilesh Kumar were among those killed. Sathe, 59, was a former wing commander of the Indian Air Force (IAF) and had served in the force's flight testing establishment, officials explained.
The four members of the cabin crew are safe, the airline Air India Express reported in a statement.
Abdul Karim, a senior police officer in the state of Kerala, said that at least 15 of the injured were in critical condition, and that there were 190 people on board the ship including passengers and crew, including 10 babies.
Television images showed the nose of the plane crashing into a brick wall, destroying part of it.
All passengers have been rescued in the operations, which took place amid heavy rain, and the injured are being treated at various hospitals in Malappuram and Kozhikode.
According to Puri, two investigation teams from New Delhi have been working since Saturday to determine the causes of the accident and have already managed to recover the flight data recorder and the voice recorder from the flight deck.
A passenger identified as Renjith Panangad, 34, said the plane touched the ground and then everything went "blank."
"After the accident, the emergency door opened and I crawled out somehow. The front of the plane was gone, it was completely gone. I don't know how I did it, but I'm grateful. I'm still in shock," he told the agency. AFP news.
The Air India Express flight from Dubai to Kozhikode, known as Calicut, was repatriating Indians who were stranded in other countries due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Ministry of Civil Aviation said in a statement.
At the time of landing "visibility was 2,000 meters and rain was reported. The aircraft was going at full speed as it landed and overshot runway 10. It continued running to the end of the runway and fell into the valley and broke in two." pieces," said the civil aviation regulator DGCA.
He also stated that Air India Express pilots attempted two landings on the runway, but aborted due to tailwind. They finally managed to land but the plane skidded and continued on.
The Kozhikode track is 2850 meters long and lies on a flat hill with deep gorges on either side, ending in a 34 meter drop. The ship fell into a valley 10 meters below, after which the fuselage of the plane split in two.
"The incident occurred due to heavy rain and poor visibility. This is really devastating," Amitabh Kant, who heads the government's planning commission, told news channel NDTV.
The accident is the country's worst passenger plane crash since 2010, when an Air India Express flight from Dubai skidded off the runway and slid down a hill while landing in the southern Indian city of Mangalore. , leaving a balance of 158 dead.
A similar tragedy had been averted at the same Kozhikode airport a year ago when a flight of the same airline suffered a tail strike while landing, but none of the 180 passengers on that flight were injured.
Harro Ranter, executive director of the Aviation Safety Network online database, said the runway-end safety area meets United Nations international civil aviation requirements, but the U.N. agency has recommended expanding the buffer zone to be 150 meters longer than what currently exists.
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